Watch the History Channel's new two-hour documentary "Einstein" on Monday, Nov. 17.

Albert Einstein is hot.

Last year, New Orleans native Walter Isaacson scored a best-seller with "Einstein: His Life and Universe."

At 8 p.m. Monday, (Nov. 17), the History Channel stokes the story with a new two-hour documentary, "Einstein," for which Isaacson, among other authorities on both the man and his work, was interviewed.

So, the question: Why Einstein and why now? His greatest breakthroughs came more than a century ago.

The network provided a couple of experts, during the July TV Tour in Hollywood, to take a crack at the answer.

"Understanding the universe in which we live, from the very everyday ... to how did I come here, how did the Earth get born, helps us know who we are, how we got here," said Laura Danly, an astronomer and curator of the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles. "The revelations of Einstein and the breakthroughs in the beginning of the 20th century that just so dramatically altered our understanding of the universe in which we live, the planet on which we live, the space and time in which we live and move, it's fundamental to knowing who we are.

In 2007, New Orleans native Walter Isaacson scored a best-seller with "Einstein: His Life and Universe."

"We can live in a cave and not know who we are, or we can come out of that
cave and say, 'We live in a remarkable universe.' And Einstein's revelations were that breakthrough out of that cave."

For his efforts, Einstein became a pop star - one of the biggest of his era - even if a comparative very few civilians fully grasped some of the concepts he pioneered.

Understanding that popularity in some ways is as important as understanding the formulas.

"Why Einstein specifically?" said Thomas Levenson, an author and head of the graduate program in science writing at MIT. "Partly it's the historical moment. Einstein came along and became a genuine icon in popular culture right at the end of World War I. And I think we've broadly seen him -- and to a certain extent is still understood today -- as somebody whose life and work provide an answer and rebuke to catastrophe, chaos - the inhumanity of man. Einstein was very much seen that way in the early '20s when he was first famous. And I think people still see Einstein as kind of an icon of reason.

"And that actually also speaks to the bigger kinds of things that Laura was speaking to as well, because what is science? Science is a body of facts, a certain amount of discoveries. It's understanding what makes your computer work and all that sort of stuff, but it is also a method for deriving valuable knowledge about how to live in the world ... and possibly even how to live in the world in an ethical way. Einstein is the person who really tried to embody that in his life. He had a conscious sense of that. And I think that's a story you can tell over and over again."